The boulevard of broken dreams

It is the epitome of romance and style. But Paris is in the grip of an unprecedented 'flight of the young', with the disenchanted looking to London and New York for a new life. On the eve of the French elections a generation of young Parisiens, frozen out economically and racially, are turning their back on the city

As you step off the Eurostar at Gare du Nord it's sometimes hard to know whether you're really in Paris or still in London. This used to be one of the smokiest, dirtiest and most romantic railway stations in Europe. These days it is as anodyne, clean and dull as Paddington. With its Upper Crust sandwich bars and McDonald's, it even looks like west London. Worse still, the same effect is starting to take hold all over Paris: there's a massive Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysees, Starbucks is now all over the city - even in the former avant-garde stronghold of Montparnasse - while Lily Allen, who is never off the radio or telly, is the latest style icon for all snotty Parisian gamines under the age of 20.

You don't have to spend a long time in central Paris, however, to realise that there is one massive difference between the two cities. Unlike grimy, busy London, Paris still moves at a relatively stately place. The long boulevards are usually uncluttered, even at rush hour. It's almost always possible to get a decent table in a good restaurant without a reservation, even on Friday night. But as it slowly dawns on you that Paris is a sedate haven for the middle-class and the middle-aged, the fashionable areas of town - the so-called beaux quartiers - can suddenly seem not just beautiful but eerie. This phenomenon is most marked just south of the Champs-Elysees, near Place de l'Alma, where Diana met her death. This is the heart of Paris, the most important and cosmopolitan city in Europe; but with its empty avenues and silent and uninviting streets, it can look just like the opening scenes of a zombie movie. It's then that you ask yourself the question that has been nagging you since you arrived here: where have all the young people gone?

Interestingly, 'la fuite des jeunes' ('the flight of young people') has also become a burning issue in the French press, including Le Monde and, most notably, the daily Le Parisien, which for months has regaled its readers with the tales of young Parisians finding the good life at the other end of the Eurostar. Indeed, the real issue in this election - at least for young voters - is not la securite (crime and delinquency), but unemployment.

The politicians who are arguing that they will clean up the streets are still fighting the last election; meanwhile, young people in France look at the latest statistics - one in eight unemployed in some parts of Paris - and begin to despair of ever making a living in France.

The simple fact is that, in the past few years, young people have been leaving France in unprecedented numbers. More worrying still is that although depopulation was a worry in the French countryside in the Sixties, it now has become a specifically urban phenomenon. Nor is it confined to Paris: Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux and Marseille can all report an exodus of young people towards les pays Anglo-Saxons (the United States and the UK). This fact was acknowledged by politician Nicolas Sarkozy when he made his flying visit to London last month to visit the French community there - at 400,000 people this is (as the newspaper Le Parisien helpfully pointed out) equivalent to one of the largest French cities.

The echoes of the riots of November 2005 are never far away in discussions of the new French emigrants. This was when, for more than a month, the suburbs outside more than 20 French towns burned as youths torched cars and fought the police, triggering the call for a state of emergency. The riots were blamed on poor housing and heavy-handed policing. No official recognition of racism has taken place. And so resentment lingers among the mainly black and Arab kids who feel excluded from the centre of Paris. The latest manifestation of this ever-present anger surged to the surface in a riot at the Gare du Nord a week ago last Wednesday, when kids just off the RER train that links the suburbs to central Paris rushed to the aid of an illegal immigrant who was being battered by police for not having a metro ticket. The ruck lasted seven hours and cost several hundred thousand pounds.

Sarkozy, former Minister of the Interior and now presidential candidate for the ruling right-wing UMP, visiting the scene hours after the riot, amid the burnt-out shops and wrecked bars, declared the battle a victory for common sense. Such incidents all help account for the success stories quoted in Le Parisien, which have notably highlighted the examples of young beurs (Arabs from North Africa) who have escaped racism in France to find good jobs in London, in the City of London. According to Algerian singer Rachid Taha, based in Paris, this racism is a legacy of the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962. 'An Algerian in France still frightens the French,' he says. 'They think he's still a terrorist who'll cut your throat for nothing.' In London, Algerians talk about their absorption into a friendly Anglo-Asian, Muslim community.

'Fucking hell! Who are we going to vote for now?' asked the headline on the cover of last week's Technikart, the hippest and most influential youth-oriented magazine in Paris. Inside, journalists analysed the 'disarray' of the young generation of voters when confronted with the 'non-choices' of Sarkozy, Segolene Royal, the later starter Francois Bayrou and the sulphurous Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front. Candidates were assessed according to their views on a range of allegedly 'youth' issues, ranging from the legalisation of cannabis to gay marriage: all were found nul or catastrophique.

In the same issue novelist Virginie Despentes, the voice of youthful feminist dissent in France, states that she won't vote for any of the 'fakers and frauds on offer. Better to leave France for good.' In the same cynical vein, Marc Weitzmann - one of the most influential figures on French youth in the past decade, a novelist and former editor of rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles - has claimed Sarkozy as the only choice. In a recent interview, Weitzmann declared that the intellectual left was dead in France, strangled by middle-class and middle-aged functionaries who despised youth and sought only to enhance their pension plans. 'There is no other choice,' says Weitzmann, a former avant-gardist and supporter of such radicals as philosopher Guy Debord and novelist Michel Houellebecq, 'Sarkozy does what all politicians do, only he does it better than most of them.'

Following Weitzmann, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, probably the most fashionable and dashingly youthful philosopher (he's in his early thirties) on the Left Bank, writes of 'democratic nihilism' and describes France as a 'failed state'. Didier Lestrade, founder of the Aids campaign group Act-Up, puts the angry voice of the French clearly: 'We're sick of voting against things. When are we going to have someone that we can vote for?'

The politicians themselves are watching the arguments among young people with a degree of caution. More to the point, after the fiasco in 2002, when Le Pen terrified the French nation (and the rest of the world) by making it to the second round of the elections, largely because of voter apathy in the first, the big political parties are eager to court young first-time voters as insurance against such variables.

The emigration of so many young people is seen most threateningly in the press as the victory of Anglo-American capitalism (most French youngsters dream of London or New York) over the French socialist model. But there is more at stake than money and jobs. Racism, poor housing and the stagnant nature of French society are also, damagingly for the present government, all cited by the present generation of young people as reasons to get away.

This is why the main political parties in France, as the presidential election finally gathers real pace, are eager to capture the youth vote as the potentially most volatile and decisive factor in a campaign that has been far from an easy ride for any of the candidates.

'It's not that I dislike Paris or France,' I was told by Jérome Leboz, a young Breton who came to Paris from Morbihan with his parents as a small child, 'but it's just become more and more impossible to see any future here if you're French.' Leboz is 24 and has a good job as a junior manager at a factory in the suburb of Levallois. But his salary barely covers his rent (in a low-grade apartment in the suburbs) and his bank refuses to give him any form of loan, let alone a mortgage, until he can name the day that he will have enough capital accrued to pay it off.

'It's a trap,' says Leboz. 'Everybody in France wants security - in their job and house - but if you are young you are denied access to owning your destiny for so many reasons. I work hard but it can seem pointless. I have enough money for a few drinks and maybe a club at the weekend, but so what? It's not a future.'

Leboz is up against the unbending nature of French society, which, in stark contrast to the liberalising movements in the rest of the Western world, is still a mixture of rigid bureaucracy and heavy-handed paternalism. More specifically, the so-called taxe Delalande - a crippling levy on any company that sacks anybody over the age of 45 - means that businesses are weighed down with an ageing workforce and unable to offer jobs to younger workers. Since the tax was introduced in 1987, the French workforce has grown older and slower, while youth unemployment has risen in the same proportion.

Whenever French young people demonstrate against the precariousness of short-term employment - as they did last spring - they should really be demonstrating against this tax. This must be one of the few countries in the world that actually has a tax that all but excludes young people from participation in real life until middle age.

But most telling of all, especially in a country that prizes education so highly, is the rocketing number of jobless graduates. According to a survey conducted by the Centre for Research on Education, Training and Employment (Cereq), of 25,000 young people who left education in 2001, 11 per cent of graduates were unemployed in 2007. Unemployment was even higher - 19 per cent - among those without a degree.

These really are staggering figures - far worse, for example, than UK unemployment figures at the depth of the Eighties slump, even in the post-industrial black spots of the North. What makes the situation even more desperate is that - unlike the UK, which in the Eighties was shedding an ageing and ill-educated workforce - the new unemployed of France should represent the future. Instead, this all adds up to a massive wave of youth disaffection, which may indeed be the real deciding factor in the elections.

Like so many of his generation, Leboz is contemplating a move to London. 'I have studied hard and worked hard,' he says. 'But I can't wait that long to begin living my life.'

'One of the difficult questions for young voters in France is that we don't know who is on the right and who is on the left any more,' says Myriam Kalfon, 24, a film student from the not terribly posh 13th arrondissement. Kalfon, like many of the young people I spoke to in Paris last week, would like to vote for Royal 'because she's a woman; because she should be kinder; because she might soften French politics'. But in reality, Kalfon has divided loyalties. 'I think Segolene is also very posh,' she says, 'and very distant from ordinary people. Also she defends things that are wrong - the big public bureaucracies and the administrations that slow everything down or make life impossible for young people.'

Kalfon thinks that Sarkozy, with his promises to reduce the public sector, may have the real answers but is too swaggering, too unpleasant, too cocky to be worth a vote. She mentions centrist Francois Bayrou, but like nearly all the young people I speak to, dismisses him as a 'teacher' and therefore 'boring'. 'The truth is', she says, 'I don't know who to vote for.' This is the most common refrain I hear among young Parisians. Most of them, from all ends of the political spectrum, are acutely conscious of their responsibility to vote and wish to avoid the kind of political accident - as it is commonly perceived - that allowed Le Pen a shot at the presidency last time. But they are also cautious, and don't want to give away their votes too easily.

Kalfon's view - that there is no right and left in French politics any more - is also typical. More specifically, Royal's Socialist party is seen as defending the vested interests of the bloated administrative classes - precisely those forces that hold so many young people back. Sarkozy, on the other hand, is a straight-forward right-winger who nonetheless, because he advocates entrepreneurship and individual businesses, appeals to website designers, DJs, hip-hop record label owners and, especially important for Kalfon, young film-makers. 'It's a real dilemma,' says Kalfon. 'I hate everything Sarko stands for, but sometimes I listen and it seems he's right.' I am even more surprised by her view that what France needs is a Tony Blair figure. 'He is a socialist, but one who believes in freedom and flexibility.'

I am rather taken aback by this statement, but it is not the first time in recent months that I have heard Blair cited by French people, especially young French people, as an emblem of change and youth. But then, Blair probably does seem a relatively fresh figure to a generation of French youth who have known nothing but the same parade of elderly dinosaurs in power since they were born.

'You can see how sad Paris is by its nightlife,' says Kalfon, who loves to go out but is bored of the same limited round of expensive clubs. 'There is none of the street culture of London here. It is as if young people are not wanted here, either in work or just for fun at night.'

Actually, it's not that Paris doesn't have young people or a youth scene, but that over the past decade or so the young have been increasingly driven out of the city centre by a combination of high prices and restrictive laws on noise and nightclub management. There is still a relatively thriving bar scene out at Oberkampf and the Canal Saint-Martin, east of the city. Unlike, say, Manchester or Barcelona, where the urban centres have been painted in primary colours as party central, youth culture in Paris tends to occupy space at the edges of the city.

The result is that at night Saint-Germain-des-Pres - the area where Western youth rebellion was born in the Fifties in a blur of angular hard-bop jazz and existentialism - is dead as a ditch, no more than a crossroads flanked by Armani and H&M. A mile or so up the road, the Quartier Latin, until the early Seventies the home of Parisian bohemian youth, is now no more than a tourist trap. Even the Marais, for the past two decades the part-Jewish and now mainly gay district, is no more than a playground for a well-heeled international clientele, lacking anything like the gritty edge of Soho, where all sexes and races mill around overcrowded and riotous pubs. The Marais, even at its buzziest on a Friday night, seems both relatively sober and - I use the word advisedly - rather straight.

Kalfon identifies herself as both Israeli and French, a combination she finds increasingly difficult. 'I think Paris has always been an anti-semitic city, but I didn't notice it or even think about it a few years ago. Now I don't like too much to go to really Jewish areas. I don't know why - I love the Hebrew language and am proud to be a Jew. I just think the climate is changing, and Paris is becoming a less tolerant place.'

I mention 19-year-old Ilan Halimi, who was kidnapped in February 2006 in the traditionally Jewish area of Rue des Rosiers, then tortured and murdered by an anti-semitic gang. 'It's not good to think about,' she shudders. 'This is not the Paris I want to live in.'

Frederic Castor, a 30-year old black guy from French Guiana, a would-be writer and music fan, is also convinced that France has become less racially tolerant and more dangerous in his lifetime. 'I can remember the Eighties, even the early Nineties, and France was not like this, so tense and hard.' Castor lives in the suburbs in Asnieres-sur-Seine, scene of some of the worst disturbance during the riots of November 2005.

'It was terrible. I don't approve of violence or rioting,' he says, 'but you can only understand how bad it is to live here if you're black or Arab, when every time you go into a shop you don't know, you become an object of suspicion.'

Castor never took much interest in the Anglophone world when he was a child, but now he is working hard on his English language skills, hoping to make it as a translator, a writer, a screenplay author. 'I never used to, but now I dream of New York or London. I envy the air of freedom. That is what we are losing in France.' In recent years, he has stopped going into central Paris more than is strictly necessary. 'I am just an ordinary guy,' he says, 'maybe with some intellectual ambitions, so I cannot take the humiliation of being searched by police for nothing, and I hate the gaze of white people when that happens. It's a complete humiliation. What we are seeing in France is two sorts of apartheid - first there is the hatred of young people, and then there is the hatred of people of colour. To be young and black in Paris is a source of dishonour and shame.'

Castor's view accounts for the simmering tensions that mark each encounter between immigrant youth and the police - who in Paris in particular have always been organised on quasi-military lines. It also explains the slow death of youth culture in the centre of the city. When I was a student in Paris in the Eighties, it was common enough among white kids to spend the night moving between the mainstream discos such as Le Palace, and the underground African or North-African clubs, then mainly in the 11th or 12th arrondissement. This is no longer the case. 'Black kids from the suburbs won't come into Paris now unless they have to,' says Castor. 'Why should they? They don't need to know white people.'

The divisions in French society around the issues of race and youth are evidently growing ever sharper. But what is truly dangerous is the way in which the main political parties seem to be in deep denial about this. I spoke briefly to Justin Viasse, an academic at the distinguished Sciences-Po and co-author (with Jonathan Laurence) of a recent piercing study of discontent in the suburbs called Integrating Islam. 'There are only two people who can really change things in France, and that is Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal - Le Pen only wants to go backwards,' he said. 'But I am not sure if they have understood the complexity or urgency of the problem.'

This seems to be very much the case. When I asked Royal, in an interview last summer, whether she had plans to tackle the despair of youth, she fudged the issue: talking endlessly about 'professional training', but never really acknowledging that the 'flight of youth' had any basis in reality, and certainly not in failed racial or economic policies. But by then she also had committed the fatal error of saying the rioters of November 2005 should be sent to boot camps, thereby alienating not only the kids in the suburbs but all those who thought they had a point. Since then she has struggled to make any impact with the younger generation.

Sarkozy is an altogether more macho figure - but he, too, needs the youth vote. 'Sarko', however, plays badly with the younger voters, both as the nasty-minded provocateur who called the November rioters 'racaille' (scum) and as a posturing would-be tough guy. 'Sarko has balls,' I was told by Rachid, a young Algerian from the suburbs, 'but he has all the wrong ideas.'

Even many of the older generation, who want to like his tactics against 'hooliganism', see him as a bully and a thug. But above all, what 'Sego' and 'Sarko' and the others are finding, much to their consternation, is that young people in Paris are not only conspicuously absent from the mainstream life of the city but are turning their backs on the traditional French values that politicians have so far taken for granted - that the 'flight of youth' from France is no mere reflection of temporary unemployment statistics, but marks a generational change that will have consequences over the coming years and decades.

Politicians of all parties have signalled their fear that Paris may become just another provincial city in the new globalised and multiracial Europe. While London is slowly pulling ahead of the rest of Europe as an economic powerhouse and a magnet for migrants - becoming in the process the New York of Europe - Paris, with its rising unemployment figures and stagnant economy, seems to be travelling in completely the opposite direction.

Youth emigration on such a massive scale is the clearest signal of all that France is in deep trouble. 'Of course I am patriotic and glad to be French,' says Frederic Castor, contemplating the new horizons of Southwark or Brooklyn. 'But the problem is - for how much longer?'

· Andrew Hussey is the author Paris: The Secret History, now out in Penguin paperback

Her placard says: 'I want to succeed in France. Let's get a move on!'

Helene Lamouroux24, student

'There is a lack of dialogue between generations, and between those who are in power and those who aren't. There is a lack of solidarity. Everyone is too focused on their little problems.

'I spent a gap year in Argentina and saw how people with very little - without grants and benefit, or in public universities whose fabric is crumbling - can be creative, work hard, have high standards and a smile on their face. We grumble a lot, but I also quite like that French thing of speaking out when things aren't as they should be.

'The riots in 2005 showed that there are problems. The student demonstrations against the first employment contract in the spring of 2006 also showed a sense of dissatisfaction. But life has got harder for everyone. We all have to try harder.

'French society is terribly fractured. The left-right divide is part of that and, to me, it's an outdated concept. That's why I'll vote for [centrist] Francois Bayrou. He tries to unite people. I was pleased to see the socialists come up with a female candidate, but I won't vote for Segolene Royal just because she's a woman. I get the impression someone else is writing her script. As Interior Minister, Sarkozy put police everywhere. In his rhetoric, he increases the divisions between people by emphasising their differences.

'My boyfriend is trying to start his own video production company. It's a nightmare because of all the charges and paperwork. I want to start my own communications agency, but if I can't get it off the ground in six or seven years, I can imagine leaving for a dynamic country like Canada, the US, Spain or Britain.'Interview by Alex Duval Smith

'The police with us, not against us'

Alexandre Lacour18, unemployed

'French youth have been abandoned by the generation that's in power. I had problems in school, but because I had passed my 18th birthday, the education authorities didn't care about giving me guidance.

'I've heard teachers say, "I don't care what you do. I get my salary at the end of the month." No one should ever hear that from their teacher.

'Both my parents used to be in the police. It's not surprising that there were riots in the autumn of 2005. They were a response to the police, who are rude to young people and constantly asking for our ID. They need to be completely restructured.

'The police who deal with us are inexperienced officers from the south of France who are sent up here to cut their teeth in the suburbs. Their attitude is, "We're going to show those Parisians that they're not in charge."

'I love Paris. But here, unless you're working or studying, you get up to no good. France has become very splintered and selfish. Everyone has their clan - the racists, the anti-gays, the Jews, etc. People should mix more and try to get on.

'I was brought up with the idea that there is only one party, the Socialists. I shall vote for Segolene Royal. I don't see her as particularly great, but she has many experienced politicians around her. As a woman, perhaps she will have the quality of calming things down in politics. Sarkozy is, if anything, more terrifying than Le Pen. At least it's clear where Le Pen stands.'ADS

'I'll take an interest in politics when it takes an interest in me'

Kalilou Sissoko19, professional handball player

'The candidates to succeed Jacques Chirac seem less crooked, but I have doubts about Nicolas Sarkozy. He says he's changed, which makes you wonder whether he has just changed because there's a campaign on.

'My father is from Senegal and came to France in 1983. He rose from being a cleaner to being a part-owner in the hotel where he worked. I shall vote for Segolene Royal, because she is of the left. She is the one candidate who has the good grace to not lump youth and delinquents together in every sentence. Her approach is that everyone has the right to live together. Sarkozy just divides people.

'There is a real problem between the police and young people. I was sitting with a friend in a sandwich shop and the police came in and asked for my ID. I said, "Why don't you check the [white] guys out there on their scooters?" They just said, "Are you trying to tell us how to do our job?" and that was the end of the conversation.

'My handball club pays me 590 [£400] a month if we win, 380 if we lose. I'm going back to school to get a diploma so I can get a job as a salesman, but I'm also hoping to get hired by a bigger team and earn more from my sport. I've been to Spain and Portugal and life seems a lot better there - more optimistic. At least, if you cannot get a job, it's warm.' ADS

'They said to me: "You'll never find work"'

Hamid Senni31, company director in the UK

'My parents came to France from a very poor mining area in the south-east of Morocco. We were told that if we respected French values and studied hard, we'd break out of poverty. But when I applied to business school, they told me I'd never get a job. I wouldn't know the right people. I thought: isn't this the country of supreme meritocracy, where skills are more important than background?

'When I tried for an internship in the final year, I couldn't even get an interview. I had to escape, so I went to Sweden to finish my studies. Going there made me realise just how bad the discrimination was in France. I sent five CVs to the UK and was offered three interviews. A few years later, as a project manager for Sony Ericsson, I went back to Paris on assignment. Everyone in management positions there was white and male.

'When the internet bubble burst, I lost my job and my family persuaded me to return to France. From November to March, I spent five days a week looking for a job and got one interview - as a door-to-door salesman. Then I applied to other countries and landed interviews all over Europe. I landed a job with BP in London and now I run my own consulting firm.

'The situation in France is like the caste system in India. If you are born in a certain social area, that's where you'll remain.'Interview by Killian Fox